THE goal of all labor and delivery units and of birthing centers is a safe birth for both newborn and mother. Yet, an examination of current statistics raises significant questions about whether that aim is being achieved. A report released this year found that more than 2 women die of pregnancy-related causes every day in the United States, with the maternal mortality ratio doubling from 6.6 d...

Evidence • A 2007 systematic review (26 studies, 2767 patients) assessed the use of pedometers to increase physical activity levels and improve health1: -Pedometers increased the mean steps per day by 2491 in randomized controlled trials (P < .001) and 2183 in observational studies (P < .0001). -Having a “step goal” (most commonly, working up to 10 000 steps a day) predicted increased activity ...

BACKGROUND The burden of catheter-related infections (CRIs) in developing countries is severe. In South Africa, a standardised surveillance definition does not exist and the collection of catheter days is challenging. The aim of the study was to provide baseline data on the prevalence of CRIs and to describe the epidemiology of CRI events within a tertiary academic hospital. METHODS Surveilla...

I the context of wastewater management, microbial hazards are often addressed in risk assessment (RA) studies but are at present not routinely included in life cycle assessment (LCA) studies. A recent attempt to include pathogen risk in LCA of wastewater management explored the application of quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) with the intent to compare pathogen risk with other poten...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this investigation is to estimate the incidence rates of upper extremity injuries and to give an overview of the most frequent diagnoses. MATERIALS AND METHODS Two population databases were queried for all injuries in the upper extremities, the SINIACA-IDB (S-IDB: Emergency Department Injury Database in Italy) and the Hospital Discharge Register (HDR). The diagnoses c...

Thermal energy for domestic hot water and heating use is stored in water tanks. Depending on the time of charging and the consumption the size of the storage tank has to be adjusted. In solar thermal systems, tanks sizes are typically around 0.3 – 0.5 cubic meter for single family houses and in case of seasonal storage systems up to several hundreds of cubic meters in district heating systems. ...

Extensive Monte-Carlo simulations were performed to study bond percolation on the simple cubic (s.c.), face-centered cubic (f.c.c.), and body-centered cubic (b.c.c.) lattices, using an epidemic kind of approach. These simulations provide very precise values of the critical thresholds for each of the lattices: pc(s.c.) = 0.248 812 6 ± 0.000 000 5, pc(f.c.c.) = 0.120 163 5 ± 0.000 001 0, and pc(b...

The aim of this prospective clinical study was to compare the results of B-glucose estimations performed simultaneously on glucometer Advance (with Micro-draw strips) and Optium (G3 strips) by lay healthy volunteers under non-standardized conditions of everyday life, to assess the difficulties dealing with lay-handling of these systems and to demonstrate the possibilities of the software Glucob...

BACKGROUND Pregnant women may have an increased risk of stroke compared with nonpregnant women of similar age, but the magnitude and the timing of such risk are unclear. We examined the risk of a first stroke event in women of childbearing age and compared the risk during pregnancy and in the early postpartum period with the background risk outside these periods. METHODS AND RESULTS We conduc...

Numbers of caesarean sections, inguinal hernia repairs, and operations for strangulated hernia performed in 1979-81 at 10 rural hospitals in eastern Africa were matched against estimated populations in the respective catchment areas. Annual rates of each operation varied considerably between hospitals, the averages being: for caesarean sections 25 per 100 000 per year; for inguinal hernia repai...